Affective Rhythms: Experience of Trauma in Alan Clarke’s Films from the 1980s

Abstract

Alan Clarke’s films from the 1980s are usually characterized as radical tests of the boundaries of social realism and narrative minimalism. As such, they have been described as highly political, although their political potential relates primarily to form rather than content (plot or story). Clarke’s critical approach to current affairs in Britain leads not only to a stark and pessimistic diagnosis of the state of the nation and the country but also to an analysis of the national and social traumas of the 1980s. Specific formal and narrative strategies employed by the director are highly affective – he uses intersecting patterns of different, persistent, and repetitive rhythms, visual, aural, and temporal, not to convey an intellectual meaning but rather to affect the viewer, to immerse them in a kind of trance-like experience. The author uses Jill Bennett’s reflections on trauma and affect in art to analyse the rhythmic designs of two of Clarke’s films: Road (1987) and Contact (1985).